Codus Operandi
Codus Operandi
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How to Increase Your Luck Surface Area
"Luck Surface Area" is a turn of phrase that popped out my mouth during a discussion<br>episode of TechZing a few months back and<br>is something I've been meaning to write<br>about ever since but never got around to actually doing. However, thanks to<br>Lance Jones<br>who referenced the concept in a recent blog post I have finally been spurred into<br>action.
If there's one thing I've discovered in recent years it's this. The amount of<br>serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly<br>proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about<br>combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.<br>It's a simple concept, but an extremely powerful one because what it implies is<br>that you can directly control the amount of luck you receive. In other words,<br>you make your own luck.
Here's how it works. When you pour energy into a passion, you develop an expertise<br>and an expertise of any kind is valuable. But quite often that value can actually<br>be magnified by the number people who are made aware of it. The reason is that<br>when people become aware of your expertise, some percentage of them will take<br>action to capture that value, but quite often it will be in a way you would never<br>have predicted. Maybe they'll want to hire you, or partner with you, or invest in<br>you, or who knows what. But in whatever way it happens, it will be serendipitous.
But it's not just the expertise that's important, the very passion that created<br>the expertise has value in its own right. This is because people want to be excited<br>about things and passion is infectious. When you do something you're excited about<br>you will naturally pull others into your orbit. And the more people with whom you<br>share your passion, the more who will be pulled into your orbit.
To satisfy my mathematically oriented brain I've gone one step further and formalized<br>the concept into the equation L = D * T, where L is luck, D is doing and T is telling.<br>This demonstrates clearly that the more you do and the more people you tell about it,<br>the larger your Luck Surface Area will become. And while I like equations, it's the<br>graphical representation that really brings the concept home.
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My name is Jason Roberts and I live in Pasadena, CA where I'm a<br>serial entrepreneur,<br>freelance coder,<br>and co-host of the tech / startup podcast TechZing.<br>Read more...
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